Posts Tagged ‘ strategic alternatives ’

Two rivals in short-term property rentals, HomeAway and Airbnb, present the traveling consumer with alternative lodging offers. For property owners, each provides a different model for interfacing with consumers. This brief interview with HomeAway CEO, Brian Staples, gives a good overview of the differences. HomeAway brings the consumer and property owner together, but does not…

CEOs worry about more than their corporate profits. In this ebook companion to his latest book (“Strategic Capitalism: The New Economic Strategy for Winning the Capitalist Cold War”), D’Aveni compiles the unfiltered comments from eighteen of the top US corporate leaders concerning the state of US capitalism. They offer some of their ideas for returning…

Two rivals in the online travel reservation industry are competing and sharing at the same time. TripAdvisor and Booking.com provide online hotel reservation service. TripAdvisor is publicly traded on NASDAQ. Booking.com is owned by publicly-traded The Priceline Group, which has five primary brands (Booking.com, priceline.com, Agoda.com, KAYAK, and Rentalcars). It also has several other ancillary…

Andrew Carnegie epitomized the self-made businessman. Born in Scotland in 1835, he built a steel empire in the US and then donated much of his wealth to the expansion of the New York Public Library. In this brief video clip, the editor looks at the period around 1869, when the Transcontinental Railroad was completed and…

Any of the completed work from these activities can be converted to face-to-face discussion. Try adapting the content to your specific course format. Using your classroom teams in their online Wiki sites, have students conduct the following studies: Innovation disruption, as presented in the short case on Caretotell this month, often is a strategy alternative…

With the recent acquisition of the news app company, Summly, Yahoo continues its current trend to purchase innovative offers rather than design its own. Over the course of the last year, it acquired six start-up companies: Snip.It, OnTheAir, Jybe, Stamped, Alike, and Propeld. These companies add to Yahoo’s strategy to develop its mobile social marketing…

New consumers around the world want products. Companies need to figure out how to leverage their global footprint in order to capture new market shares. Foreign business in countries such as Denmark may be small, but their exporting activity is in excess of 40% of the country’s GDP. The US no longer dominates the world…

Iron ore mining costs rise beyond control for Anglo American’s Minas-Rio Brazil project. Permit and licensing difficulties with the Brazilian government led the company to write down $4 billion in the project value this month. This may be the first of other write downs, as costs continue to rise over three times beyond the original…

At this year’s Davos World Economic Forum, Nestlé CEO, Paul Bulcke, advises that government and government officials need to think longer-term. The policy-making activity appears to be disconnected from economic activity. Sustainability issues, such as water usage, are important to the Nestlé business model and for society in general. Through innovation and careful attention to…

Silicon Valley companies listen to Clayton Christensen, HBS professor, when he discusses his theories on disruptive innovation. The Health Trust, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to the protection of health in its community, centers its work on three initiatives: the healthy living initiative, the healthy aging initiative, and the healthy communities’ initiative. Through grants, it…